Mapping the Flow: Journals, Lists, Daily News

Rudolph Blume Fine Art presents Mapping The Flow: Journals, Lists, Daily News. Curated by Tudor Mitroi. On view February 27 – March 26, 2016. Opening Reception: February 27, 2016 from 6-8pm. Featuring work by artists Ed Blackburn, Vincent Falsetta, Annette Lawrence and Tudor Mitroi.

This art exhibition is about the elusiveness of time and our frantic efforts to pin it down. “Time is an illusion” is an often-heard trope and the modern sciences are on the verge of confirming it.

Against this backdrop of time as wobbly and soft as one of Dali’s watches, human activity in general and the artists in this exhibition in particular have tried to impose order and define time in line with our intuitive expectations.

Annette Lawrence has deep roots in Houston ever since she was a core fellow at the Glassell School of Art in 1994. Lawrence has always been interested in periodic information relating to cycles, rhythms or phases, but she explores them not following a rigid methodology, yet according to her own intuition and creative agency. She recently finished a “magnum opus” where she created 12 cyclical graphite drawings based on digitized and coded journal notes about her personal life and activities representing the last 25 years.

In his own way of recording, Vincent Falsetta created an expansive installation of works that consists of index cards full of notes regarding the composition of his abstract painting such as sketches, formulas or color trials and also intimate musings relating to his life as an artist. He started in the 1980s and each finished painting creates from 2 to 10 cards ordering his ideas and concepts like a visual mantra.

In his new work Ed Blackburn, the great storyteller, mines mostly political events as seen through the media-spin for mythic heroes. Today’s politics provide some fascinating reenactments of the old tales of power, greed and betrayal. These events are Blackburn’s markers of time, however fleeting and probably soon to be forgotten.

Tudor Mitroi’s most recent drawings start out with no particular formal concept in mind, but as Paul Klee would say he lets his “line go on a walk”. An adventurous walk – and soon we see textures and structures emerge, some resembling landscapes or aerial maps. Date lines are superimposed denoting historical events that have never happened.

The task of the artists in this exhibition is not confined to grapple with making time experience orderly and accessible, but also to explore new time concepts that emerge from current scientific thought.